The history of television is a vast wasteland of terrible decisions. For every groundbreaking show like Breaking Bad, Star Trek, and All in the Family that got on the air, there are 50 duds like Capitol Critters, Homeboys in Outer Space, and Joanie Loves Chachi. For every brilliant network idea, like NBC allowing Jerry Seinfeld to make a “show about nothing,” there are 100 insane ones, like ABC allowing Jim Belushi to create 182 episodes of According to Jim across eight seasons.
It wasn’t easy, but we combed through six decades and picked out the 50 worst decisions in the history of television. The goal wasn’t to center this on “Jumping the Shark” moments, which is why you won’t see entries about Felicity getting a haircut or Cousin Oliver moving in with the Brady Bunch. We instead focused on choices made at the network level by clueless suits. That said, a few dumb writing decisions — like the infamous Armin Tamzarian episode of The Simpsons — were hard to avoid. Crusher
This list could have easily been six times longer, since buffoons have been running networks since the earliest days of television, so feel free to add your own ideas on X (formerly Twitter) using the hashtag #BadTVDecisions. (If you’re interested in how a similar level of weapons-grade stupidity can play out in the world of music, here’s our list of the 50 Worst Decisions in Music History from last year.)
Warning: Some of these are agonizing to relive, especially when you consider that we could all exist in a world where Lost ended in a satisfying way, MTV never aired an episode of Ridiculousness, and NBC didn’t pave the way for Donald Trump’s presidency.
The producers of Jeopardy! did not have an easy path in front of them when Alex Trebek died in 2020 after a 36-year run as the host of the show. In the minds of most viewers, he was Jeopardy! and it was impossible to imagine anyone else behind the podium. Producer Mike Richards played a large role in the search for a new host. And taking a page straight from the Dick Cheney 2000 playbook, he came to the completely unbiased decision that nobody was more qualified for the job than himself. The powers that be at Jeopardy! agreed, and they announced he was the new permanent host. Within days, offensive comments he’d made on a podcast came to light, along with issues related to the treatment of models during his time working on The Price is Right. He stepped down as host after taping five shows in a single day. For comparison, Anthony Scaramucci made it 11 days as White House communications director in 2017. When Scaramucci outlasts you by a factor of 11, you know you fucked up big time.
Judging pop-culture artifacts of the past through the prism of the present can sometimes be deeply unfair. But that sort of excuse isn’t going to help America’s Top Model and its decision in 2005 to have contestants “swap ethnicities.” This meant that some of the white models wore blackface, and others changed their skin tone and wore wigs to look as if they were Native American, Haiwaiian, or Latinx. This took place in a very-primitive era of social media, so there was very-limited public outrage, but images from the episodes are quite shocking. America’s Next Top Model host Tyra Banks has defended the move in recent years. “I want to be very clear: I, in no way, put my top models in blackface,” she said. “I’m a Black woman. I am proud. I love my people, and the struggle that we have gone through continues, and the last thing that I would ever do is be a part of something that degraded my race.” We’ll take her word that she had no bad intentions, but we can’t imagine she’d do this again if given the chance.
Remember the Geico cavemen commercials? They featured sophisticated cavemen reacting with fury to Geico’s slogan that its website is so simple to use, “even a caveman can do it.” It was a clever way to sell insurance, but that doesn’t mean Americans wanted to spend 30 minutes a week in that prehistoric world. ABC thought otherwise in 2007, when it gave the cavemen their own sitcom. “I laughed through my pain,” wrote a New York Times critic. “Cavemen, set in some version of San Diego where people speak with Southern accents, doesn’t have moments as much as microseconds suspended from any attempt at narrative.” Thirteen episodes were ordered, but only seven made it to air. This failure was really a blessing, since it meant humanity didn’t have to endure copycat shows about the Budweiser Frogs, Coca-Cola Polar Bears, or the Energizer Bunny.
If you’re a woman somewhere in your late twenties or early thirties, odds are high that Lizzie McGuire was a very important show to you in your tween years. And if Hillary Duff brought Lizzie McGuire back as an adult on Disney+, odds are high you might tune in for at least a few episodes to see how Lizzie, Miranda, Gordo, and the rest of the gang fared in adulthood. That came very close to happening in 2019, when Disney+ ordered a Lizzie reboot with Duff, the entire original cast, and series creator Terri Minsky. A couple of episodes were shot, but Disney+ fired Minsky over creative differences, and Duff quit the project not long after that. According to Duff, the network wasn’t happy with the more adult tone the show was taking. “She had to be 30 years old, doing 30-year-old things,” Duff said. “She didn’t need to be doing bong rips and having one-night stands all the time, but it had to be authentic. I think they got spooked.” This is just idiocy. Lizzie McGuire fans aren’t little kids anymore. They can see Lizzie live life as an actual adult in some approximation of the real world. Had they trusted Duff and Minsky to execute their vision, something very special could have been created. By pulling the plug on it, everyone lost.
There’s no question that Saturday Night Live needed to make some changes at the end of the 1994-95 season. Ratings were in free fall, the reviews were brutal, and the NBC brass were flirting with the possibility of canceling it. When faced with this situation in the past, the show cleaned house and brought in a new generation of comedians in the hopes that some of them would catch fire. But they always held on to the more talented cast members, most notably Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, who were kept on after the 1981 season when nearly everyone else was fired. In 1995, however, Adam Sandler and Chris Farley were both given their walking papers alongside more obvious cuts like Ellen Cleghorne, Chris Elliott, and Jay Mohr. This was partially due to the relatively high salaries Sandler and Farley commanded compared with the newbies, but many NBC executives felt they simply weren’t funny anymore. Farley came back to host in 1997, just two months before his death, but Sandler was bitter about the whole situation and didn’t return until 2019. He gently roasted NBC in his musical monologue. “I was fired, I was fired,” he sang. “NBC said that I was done/Then I made over 4 billion dollars at the box office/So I guess you could say I won.”
Two years into the original run of Sex and the City, when the show was near the apex of its popularity, HBO decided to create a crass clone of the show for men. It moved the action to Chicago and saddled the central characters with spouses, which limited the potential for random hookups. That minor change couldn’t cover up the fact that the show was clearly just an inverted SATC. Seeing women talk frankly about sex was revelatory. Seeing men do the same thing on The Mind of the Married Man just felt piggish, gross, and very familiar. The show also had the misfortune of premiering weeks after 9/11, meaning people had more on their minds than Jake Weber’s sex life. The show somehow got picked up for a second season, but almost nobody was watching by that point. And when Entourage hit two years later, The Mind of the Married Man was essentially erased from history. Don’t go looking for a reboot on Max any time soon.
As the man behind L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues, and NYPD Blue, producer Steven Bochco has a pretty stellar track record when it comes to creating procedural shows for network television. But in 1990, he veered wildly off course when he came up with the ABC show Cop Rock. As the title suggests, it’s about police officers who occasionally take a break from solving crimes to sing and dance. It started when Bochco was approached with the idea of turning Hill Street Blues into a Broadway musical. When that didn’t pan out, he adapted it into a TV series. There’s a universe somewhere out there where Hill Street Blues worked on Broadway. There’s no universe where Cop Rock worked. It’s almost impossible to watch it with a straight face, especially the part in the pilot when the jury sings “He’s Guilty” with a gospel choir. The show lasted a mere 11 episodes, and Bochco whiffed just as hard two years later with his animated Washington, D.C., parody show Capitol Critters. But then he went back to basics in 1993 with NYPD Blue. It was such a huge success that Cop Rock became just a tiny, weird footnote to his career. He’d learned his lesson, though. Throughout the 12-year run of NYPD Blue, the cops didn’t sing once.
The early days of reality television were full of stunningly misogynistic shows like Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and Are You Hot? that seemed like they were designed in laboratories to make women hate themselves. Perhaps the worst example is 2004’s The Swan, where a group of women deemed “ugly ducklings” are paired with personal trainers, dentists, fashion consultants, and plastic surgeons. In the end, they compete in a beauty pageant where one is named the Swan. In the years that followed, many of the contestants said they had a miserable time on the show and regretted taking part in it. It’s impossible to know the impact it had on its viewers, but everyone involved in this project should be ashamed.
Despite several noble attempts, most notably Air America, liberals have been unable to make talk radio work. Conservatives own that space and there’s no way around it. Conversely, conservatives are just as hapless when it comes to trying to create a funny alternative to The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live. Fox News gave it its best shot in 2007 when it rolled out The ½ Hour News Hour with a crew of mock news anchors as well as former Weekend Update host turned contrarian right-winger Dennis Miller. Segments included the cartoon “Guy White: Closet Conservative” and a bit where Rush Limbaugh played the president alongside Ann Coulter as his VP. The only problem is that nothing they tried was even remotely funny to anyone anywhere on the political spectrum. Fox News yanked it after 17 episodes and went back to its standard unintentionally funny programming like The O’Reilly Factor.
Heavy Crusher Machine On April 21, 1986, 30 million people tuned into a television special called The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault. Host Geraldo Rivera breathlessly hyped the event for weeks, promising to crack open a newly-discovered vault once used by notorious crime boss Al Capone, on live television. Rivera had medical examiners on hand in case bodies were inside, along with IRS officials in case money was tucked away. But as any good lawyer will tell you, never ask a question to a witness when you don’t know the answer. And like any good TV producer will tell you, don’t crack open a vault live on television when you have absolutely no idea what’s inside. In this case, almost nothing was inside besides some empty bottles and a lot of dirt. Rivera was humiliated by the fiasco. Four decades later, it remains one of the most famous non-events in TV history.